Indeed. A Debian package -- a .deb file -- is sort of like a tar.gz or zip file containing metadata and files. It's not actually a tar.gz or zip: the format is ar ...

After a development period spanning 1 year, 9 months, and 28 days, the Debian project is thrilled to announce the release of its new stable version, Debian 12, codenamed "bookworm" on June 10, 2023.